Posts tagged ‘Google’

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The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” – William Gibson

Self-tracking, Seamless Engagement and Personal Efficiency improvement’s new frontier is Personalized Big Data and Digital Health. This is really becoming a viable idea around wearable and sensor computing and the basis for new data platform wars.

The new platforms for digital life or data driven life — that collect, aggregate and disseminate — will cover a wide range of new User Experience (UX) use cases and end-points… medical devices, sensor-enable wristwear, headset/glasses, tech-sensitive clothing. All of them are going to collect a lot of data, low latency analytics, and enable data visualization. Several new firms are entering the activity tracker market LG (Life Band Touch), Sony (the Core), Garmin (Vivofit), Glassup, Pebble, JayBird Reign etc.

Data collection is just one piece of the solution. The foundation for personalized big data is Descriptive and Predictive Analytics. Ok…What do i next? what is the suggestion? in the form of predictive search (automated deduction or augmented reality).

How do i discover useful patterns, analyze, visualize, share, query and mobilize the collected data? A wide range of start-ups – Cue, reQall, Donna, Tempo AI, MindMeld, Evernote, Osito, and Dark Sky – and big companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, LG and Samsung are working on predictive apps — aimed at enabling new robo-assistants that act as personal valets, anticipating what you need before you ask for it.

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“Welcome to the Internet of Customers. Behind every app, every device, and every connection, is a customer. Billions of them. And each and every one is speeding toward the future.” Salesforce.com

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Mobile and social are major data exhaust producers. Mining this data is the new frontier. Did you know that every 60 SECONDS, a tidal wave of unstructured data is being produced, consumed and archived via mobile devices. As you read this ask yourself: what does this mean?

The smartphone has revolutionized the way we communicate, search, shop, share, purchase and stay connected. What were only concepts 10 years ago are reality today.

The smartphone industry is massive, with close to 2 billion devices shipped annually and total spending on wireless-related services of more than $1.6 trillion across the world. As mobile devices increasingly serve as the center of the consumer’s world, their importance to a range of companies is increasing.

I am convinced that analytical insights coupled with Mobile Technology (action enabler and insight consumption channel) will profoundly change consumer behavior and the basis of competition. All customer touch points (loyalty, e-mail, web, social, payments, e-commerce, coupons) are converging on the mobile phone. A whole new form of mobile customer engagement is just starting to take shape.

Companies are racing to comeup with new ways to leverage “next best action/offer” analytics in a world where customer experience is getting more complex. Take retail for instance. In a multi-channel and multi-device world, as consumers move across channels, new techniques are needed to capture and increase conversion rate. (Conversion rate is the percentage of people who come to your website and take desired actions, such as purchasing something or requesting more information.)

Imagine this scenario…. let’s say a friend tweets about a new 60 inch Samsung smart TV they bought at Best Buy. You read the tweet, but click on the URL on the mobile device and check it out. Even though that was the last click, what made the transaction happen was a satisfied friend posting a recommendation via social media and retrieved on a mobile device. The ability to convert the visitor requires analytics… where they came from, what caused them to come to the site, what offer to present, etc.

Social technology adoption and usage by consumers is no longer an early adopter market — it’s a mainstream activity. Mobile is accelerating this trend. All this means a “new customer interaction” model powered by big data is emerging.

Why is big data analytics a good lens for creating value around social:

Business decisions approach real-time. Time available to capture data is decreasing. Analysis of increasing data volumes have to become faster. Operational excellence requires immediate action. Real-time capture and action is where the state of the art is.

Coupled with mobile and cloud, it means the emergence of a new Customer Interaction Model for corporations

All this data growth and value creation trends imply that data management, Big Data and real-time analytics is a big focus in social and mobile data going forward. Clearly a new style of IT is emerging (see this figure from HP Analyst Briefing which conveys the computing transformation message quite well).

In most enterprises, whether it’s a public or private enterprise, there is typically a mountain of data, structured and unstructured data, that contains potential insights about how to serve their customers better, how to engage with customers better and make the processes run more efficiently. Consider this:

Data is seen as a resource that can be extracted and refined and turned into something powerful. It takes a certain amount of computing power to analyze the data and pull out and use those insights. That where the new tools like Hadoop, NoSQL, In-memory analytics and other enablers come in.

What business problems are being targeted?

Why are some companies in retail, insurance, financial services and healthcare racing to position themselves in Big Data, in-memory data clouds while others don’t seem to care?

Defining Business Analytics

What is Business Analytics? Business Analytics is the intersection of business and technology, offering new opportunities for a competitive advantage. Business analytics unlocks the predictive potential of data analysis to improve financial performance, strategic management, and operational efficiency.

What is BI? BI is the "computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing 'hard' business data, such as sales revenue by products or departments or associated costs and incomes. Objectives of BI implementations include (1) understanding of a firm's internal and external strengths and weaknesses, (2) understanding of the relationship between different data for better decision making, (3) detection of opportunities for innovation, and (4) cost reduction and optimal deployment of resources." (Business Dictionary). Most widely used BI tool is Microsoft Excel.
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What is Big Data? Big data refer to data scenarios that grow so large (petabytes and more) that they become awkward to work with using traditional database management tools. The challenge stems from data volume + flow velocity + noise to signal conversion. Big data is spawning new tools that are mix of significant processing power, parallelism and statistical, machine learning, or pattern recognition techniques
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Corporate performance management software and performance management concepts, such as the balanced scorecard, enable organizations to measure business results and track their progress against business goals in order to improve financial performance.
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Data visualization tools, include mashups, executive dashboards, performance scorecards and other data visualization technology, is becoming a major category.
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BI platforms provide a range of capabilities for building analytical applications. Examples are Oracle OBIEE, SAP Business Objects 4.0. There are many choices and combinations of BI platforms, capabilities and use cases as well as many emerging BI technologies such as in memory analytics, interactive visualization and BI integrated search. The idea of standardizing on one supplier for all of one’s BI capabilities is difficult to do. Increasingly, standardization and more about managing a portfolio of tools used for a set of capabilities and use cases.
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Data integration tools and architectures in support of BI continue to evolve. Extract-Transfer-Load (ETL) tools make up a big segment of this category in addition to data mapping tools. Organizations must now support a range of delivery styles, latencies, and formats.
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BI is about "sense and respond." Analytics is about "anticipate and shape" models.

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Business Analytics 3.0 blog is meant for decision makers and managers who are trying to make sense of the rapidly changing technology landscape and build next generation solutions. It is aimed at helping business decision makers navigate the "Raw Data -> Aggregate Data -> Intelligence -> Insight -> Decisions" chain.